Photo Credit: Cristóbal Tapia de Veer for Spotify
“White Lotus” composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer says he will not be returning for the show’s fourth season due to creative differences with series creator Mike White.
The music from Emmy-winning series ‘The White Lotus’ is as iconic as the HBO anthology series itself, with countless remixes of the main theme cropping up in clubs. That’s thanks to music composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, whose work earned the show three of its 15 Emmy awards. But now, Tapia de Veer reveals he won’t be back for the show’s fourth season.
Tapia de Veer shared the news of his exit with The New York Times, explaining that he told the show’s production team months ago. The decision stems from creative differences with series creator Mike White.
“We already had our last fight forever,” said Tapia de Veer. “I feel like this was, you know, a rock n’ roll band story. This is like a rock band I’ve been in before where the guitar player doesn’t understand the singer at all.”
“I announced to the team a few months ago that I was not coming back, that I was leaving. I didn’t tell Mike for various reasons; I wanted to tell him just as the end for the shock and whatever,” he explained. “Except I told the whole editorial team and music editor and producer and all that, but I didn’t think that they were going to tell him. At some point, he heard about that.”
Tapia de Veer says he and White disagreed on how upbeat the series’ music should be. White initially wanted “something you would listen to in Ibiza in some clubby place with a chill, sexy vibe.”
“There’s literally no edge to it. It’s a good song; it’s nice music. There’s just absolutely no — whatever you find in the ‘White Lotus’ music, the relationships with the characters — there’s none of that. It’s just nice background music,” he said. “I just stuck to what I was doing. And when I was giving versions, it was still the same thing [as the title theme]: there were still crazy people and screaming and stuff like that. From there, it became this weird relationship of how do I pass all this weird music into the show?”
“I texted the producer and I told him that it would be great to, at some point, give them the longer version with the ‘ooh-loo-loo-loos,’ because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway. He thought it was a good idea. But then Mike cut that — he wasn’t happy about that,” Tapia de Veer recalled. “I mean, at that point, we already had our last fight forever, I think. So he was just saying no to anything. So I just uploaded that [version] to my YouTube.”
Regardless of their differences, Tapia de Veer says he doesn’t regret the choices he made. “I was watching the Emmys and it’s like, there’s one thing I’m pretty proud of and that is I feel like I never gave up. Maybe I was being unprofessional — and for sure Mike feels that I was always unprofessional to him because I didn’t give him what he wanted — but what I gave him did this,” he said of the song’s viral success.
“People don’t remember, but at first, some people were complaining about the music: ‘I can’t concentrate on the characters, it’s too much, and I’m so stressed out.’ But I’m really happy to take those kinds of risks. That is the main thing that I’m most happy about. It was worth all the tension and almost forcing the music into the show, in a way, because I didn’t have that many allies in there.”
‘The White Lotus‘ Season 3 finale airs this Sunday on HBO and Max, with all three seasons available to stream on Max.
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